It seems odd to me that in an age where one of the more horrific tales of technology run amok is the erasure of ones complete identity that we seem to be embarking on the first steps of doing exactly that. Re-writing history or making deletions in it is a risky venture at best.

The difference with those mug shot companies and similar businesses is that their whole business model is a form of extortion -- whereas Google and Wikipedia are simply (relatively) evenhanded arbiters.

Online reputation management goes a long way. Maybe you can't erase something from the Internet, but maybe you can at least bury it to Page 12 of Google Seach Results.

It can be tough to erase legitimate mistakes from online records, including news accounts, but the line could get slippery fast. This NYT article a few months ago prompted change by some companies charging people to "erase" mug shots.

This decision can only be implemented selectively, not uniformly and fairly, because of the way the court has decided the case. It means some information on indivuals will be suppressed, some not, depending on circumstances that will bear little relation to a fair process. We have to get used to the fact that information on individuals is going to have a long tail. The court is trying to take resonsibility for evaluating the worth of the information out of the hands of the reader and putting it in the hands of a legal process. I don't trust the evenhandedness of the outcome.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.